Introducing The Overlaycloud.io Beta

Here at Containership, our software engineers have been busy building a new and really exciting product that we can’t wait for the world to play with, and we call it Overlaycloud. It’s a seriously powerful weapon that you can add to your arsenal in your war against downtime and cloud hosting spend.

There are thousands of web hosting providers out there, and while not all are created equally in terms of performance and features, they are all equally cast into the shadows by 3 or 4 big behemoths that can’t seem to stay out of the news and talking points of everyone in tech. AWS, Azure, Google Cloud Platform. With the meteoric rise in the popularity of cloud hosting for both startups and enterprises over the last decade, a bit of a vacuum was created that has been sucking the wind out of the sails of the providers that once thrived prior to this changing of the guard. But why aren’t these providers able to compete as well anymore?

Why The Little Guys Are Losing

Pricing Model

Most of the Tier2 and Tier3 hosting providers have pricing models that don’t play as nicely with the on-demand give-me-what-i-need-when-i-need-it-and-take-it-back-when-i-don’t dynamic web infrastructure that is required to scale. People want flexibility in their server and storage footprint, and calling up the sales team at Acme Host, Inc. and signing a new long term contract to get your resource pool increased doesn’t lend well to autoscaling and dynamic environments. Businesses, and the developers and operations people working for those businesses expect at least hourly billing, and more recently per-second billing. Month to month, or *gasp* annual contracts won’t cut it.

Features

Let’s face it, automation of your data center or cloud infrastructure makes it possible to move faster so you can ship code sooner and with less failures. That means beating your competition to the punch for user feedback and new feature releases. Automation doesn’t grow on trees though, it takes going down a path of gluing together and maintaining a plethora of open source tools that many companies just don’t have the expertise in house to deal with. Instead of setting off on a long hard journey of rolling their own… well… they just go use a big three cloud provider instead. AWS has automated basically everything that companies used to have to build themselves on top of something like VMWare to achieve. Nobody wants to return to what feels like the stone age when there are easier options out there.

Location, Location, Location

We live in a global society now and when it comes to commerce and online business, you can never be certain in which parts of the world things will take off and you’ll need to expand your infrastructure into. On top of that, with the proliferation of IoT, AR, and VR, low latency connectivity between end user devices and the infrastructure those devices need to interact with is paramount. The Tier2 and Tier3 providers’ are typically regional or only in one country which doesn’t lend well to future-proofing your expansion needs. The cloud providers have a serious edge here. The one benefit here is that these providers DO have data centers in places that the big guys don’t operate. If that could be leveraged in the right way, that is very very interesting when it comes to the low latency connectivity requirement for certain markets that I talked about above.

Ok, Ok. What Is Your Point?

My point is that if a technology existed that provided the features modern day developers required, such as:

• RESTful API
• Performance Graphs
• Load Balancing
• Easy Backup & Restore
• Out of the box container support
• Direct integration with Kubernetes based CaaS platform

And that technology worked by leveraging and augmenting the Tier2 and Tier3 providers server resources (You know, the ones who haven’t had lunch in years because AWS always keeps eating it)? And those features were available via hourly billing with no long term contracts. That hosting provider in your city that you never even considered before might start to look pretty attractive.

Now for the kicker…

What if everything I said above was possible to achieve, but the prices were slashed to the point of being half the price of the lowest cost quality providers out there, like DigitalOcean, Linode, or Vultr?

Welcome to Overlaycloud: Think HotelTonight for Cloud Servers

We partner with hosting providers and leverage their idle data center resources to help monetize them in new ways that their business models don’t allow, while simultaneously providing YOU with fast SSD based virtual machines on-demand, at rock bottom prices, in some of the most interesting locations around the globe. Our pricing starts as low as $3/month for 1GB/1CPU VMs (40% cheaper than Digital Ocean’s updated pricing). We cover the major internet metro areas the big guys operate in, but also operate in smaller markets like Pittsburgh. If you’re building sensors, IoT, or just like to keep money in your pocket, Overlaycloud is going to seriously change the game for you. We have built a true cloud of clouds, simple to use, top tier hardware and bandwidth, in secure facilities that meet and exceed compliance requirements.

We’re in a private beta currently, with plans to launch in the spring of 2018. As the weeks roll on we will be letting more and more people in to the beta, so head on over to the site and get your place in line before someone else does! And be sure to refer a friend (it will bump your place in line!).

We can’t wait to hear how you plan to leverage Overlaycloud. Much much more to come soon as we unveil more features and locations available. If you’re a hosting provider or have a bunch of spare data center capacity you’d like to monetize, please do not hesitate to get in touch with us!